Paintings!

[circusfish]

Ooh! Other than the drama in my life right now, I have been working very hard on paintings! They are good paintings! One of them is going to be a diptych as soon as I buy the other piece of wood. Feh! I will have to post pictures of them. I always forget to bring a digital camera. Boo! The last time I talked about my paintings, I was not happy with them. However, I have started working on large wooden panels (the largest being 4'x 6') and I've really delved into the surface. I've worked on integrating my imagery into the space so that there is an interaction between the various planes. I've carved into the wood with a drimmel, stained it, burned it with a wood burning tool (just thought I'd state the obvious) and drawn on it with charcoal, colored pencils, oil paint, carbon transfers, etc. Anyway, I'm very excited with the work I've been doing since the last quarter of last semester. And it's not all looking exactly the same either. It's creepy, playful, funny, dreamlike and kinda' sexy in an evil pedaphyllic way! By dreamlike I don't mean that it's another Salvador Dali painting. Everything seems to be normal to the children in my paintings. You know how you just accept the way things are in a dream and go on dreaming? That's the sort of mood that I'm trying to evoke. There are perfectly normal things going on that ground the pictorial space and prevent it from becoming a fantasy. For example, I have this one big horizontal painting that has a little girl taking off her sock next to a shoe rack (like the ones at the playgrounds at McDonald's). In the shoe rack there are some shoes, which is normal. In some of the other cubby holes, however, are some wierd glands, paper dolls or strange designs. The look on the girl's face suggests that everything is normal to her, although she looks porcelain and a little morose. Her fingers dig into her sock to pull it off and it looks like the sock (not the girl) is bleeding like a chunk of meat. Her sock is a dark pink, by the way. I just thought I would explain some of the weird stuff I've been doing to my friends who haven't seen my work! I am just so excited because I never thought I would be doing things as good as this when I was at UNA. Looking at more contemporary artists and having my heart ripped out by Jill (painting professor)when I wasn't doing enough or when I wasn't finished with something really helped. It's really great to have someone actually expect something from you. It hurts a lot at first, but it has been worth it to see my growth. I can't expect anyone in the south to ever want to buy my huge, weird paintings, but I think I have a shot at a good graduate school now. The only problem is where to store them...
Oh! And I'm also trying to set up an art show this summer. It's going to be hilarious! I can't reveal too much about it!
I suddenly feel a little bit better about my problems! Yay, art! I want to paint more, now!